TOMASZ ZYGLEWICZ

Philosophers, psychologists and linguists routinely use truth-value judgments as a source of evidence for the meaning of specific expressions. This method presupposes that truth-value judgments track whether what was said corresponds with facts. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that ordinary people’s behavior on the truth-value judgment task is sensitive to a range of factors beyond correspondence with facts. In this paper, we investigate how judgments of truth are influenced by considerations of truthfulness. In a series of three experiments, we present results indicating that the truth-truthfulness entanglement is at the heart of the debate over the semantics of color predicates. We use these findings to challenge contextualism about color predicates. While our substantive contribution is quite targeted, we show that the methodological lessons are likely to generalize broadly to other areas of research in cognitive science.

keywords: truth-value judgment task, truth, truthfulness, contextualism, semantics, color predicates, experimental philosophy

Reclamation of a slur involves creation of a new, positively-valenced meaning that gradually replaces the old pejorative meaning. This means that at a critical stage, the slur is ambiguous. It has been claimed that this ambiguity is polysemy. However, it is far from clear whether the view can explain why the introduction of the new meaning forces the old one out of existence. I argue that this datapoint can be explained by invoking the mechanism of homonymic conflict, and, therefore, that the ambiguity involved in reclamation is homonymy. One generalization that follows from my account is that conventionalized verbal irony, unlike conventionalized metonymy and metaphor, begets homonymy. Along the way, I criticize the standard ways of drawing the distinction between polysemy and homonymy in terms of semantic and etymological relatedness. If the notions of polysemy and homonymy are to be invoked in explanations, they should be understood in terms of how meanings are stored in the mental lexicon. My account also provides an elegant way of conceptualizing the difference between two types of conceptual engineering, namely reclamation and amelioration.

keywords: polysemy, homonymy, ambiguity, slurs, reclamation, homonymic conflict

Kyle Blumberg has recently argued that (i) the ideal worlds account of desire – according to which for S to want p is for all of S’s top-ranked worlds to be p-worlds – has difficulties accounting for certain cases involving the ascribee’s ignorance. He takes these cases to be (ii) a reason to disprefer the Kratzerian account of ‘want’ to its rivals, and (iii) to doubt that desire ascriptions are upward entailing. I challenge all three claims. Along the way, I motivate and develop a Kratzer-style account, according to which what a subject wants depends not just on their information and preferences, but also on the decision rule they embrace and the salient decision problem.

keywords: want ascriptions, attitude ascriptions, desire, uncertainty, decision theory, monotonicity